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?Buying paintings: Surrealism

Surrealists were a group of painters and artists that drew a large amount of inspiration from the potent impact from dreams. In the beginning, before this artistic movement was fully embraced, many civilized people questioned the value of these works of art. Though considered some of the more recent ground-breaking artwork yet to date by drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung, the Surrealist movement has not lost any of its’ prior affect on many a budding artist today, and influence from this art can be found in many of the works produced by the fresh artists of today.

Surrealism started as an outgrowth from another movement in the art world between the first and second World Wars. The movement that was later called Dada, and was most popular before the occurrence of WWI; many works of “anti-art” were produced as a reaction to the growing restrictions of the social world around at the time. Where Dada’s artwork was produced to deliberately defy the boundaries of reasonable interpretation, Surrealism expressed a more positive goal of combining a sense of the fantastic with a realistic eye, and creating a bold vision that took the idea of the surreal to the next level.

It is when reviewing the more creative and remarkable artists of this era, that one can come to realize the appeal and effect that the dreamy state of being has had on the art as a whole, and a person can come to grasp a more personal aspect to these unique interpretations of some of the issues that affect us today. Art is constantly being redefined from within, and it is solely upon the artist’s shoulders to weigh out the experience onto a canvas. It has been said that art imitates life and vice versa, but with Surrealism, the tables are certainly turned around when seen for oneself.

Artists and free thinking individuals such as; Andre Breton whom wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, to famed artist Pablo Picasso to whom Surrealistic success was achieved during his period of Cubism. Some of those artists who are now renowned as predecessors to the Surrealist movement began as affiliates of the Dadaism that was strongest during 1919 and the early 1920s, and some of those artists even took Surrealism to greater heights than before. Such as Marcel Duchamp who took to defying the boundaries in stride with his previous experience in the Dada movement.

Though some pieces can seem happenstance from a distance, the powerful intent of the artist to convey a new meaning through mixing up and recombining various creative influences, and even at times making new threads of thought from old ideas or objects is the goal of the artist. To defy the boundary that one has to each own their reality in life, and to put on a new sense of perspective, shaping the rest of a lifetime to come. Some of the more famed paintings are hard to find inexpensively, but buying prints can be the easiest solution to that problem.

There is still a great deal of work created today that draws heavily from the impact that Surrealist thought has made on art in general, and especially on how art can be defined on a truly individual front. The most world-renowned artists have already passed on, but their examples stand as firm points from which to gain an understanding of what Surrealism is, whether defined through a critical mind or as a sampling of how broad the area of art can be. Surrealism is an artistic expression of that state of mind that lies unexplained at the gateway of the subconscious.

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Buying Folk Art Paintings

Buying folk art paintings has become a passion of mine. I?ve been looking for them everywhere it seems. I found a bunch of folk art paintings recently and I am having trouble deciding which one to buy.

There was a folk art painting by Rev. Howard Finster that is titled Howard in 1944. This is an all enamel folk art painting that was painted in 1988. The smile on this portrait is very engaging and makes me smile just as big.

I am also really taken by a folk art painting that was painted by painter Bill Dodge in Oct 1962. The title of the painting is First Trolley To Van Nuys. The painting is on board and depicts the center of town with all the people in town. They are in the windows and on the street. The town market, bakery, Hotel Van Nuys, an ice cream parlor and the Wing Lee Laundry are all depicted in vibrant color. The women in the foreground are against the Trolley and their signs say “Ban the Monster” and “Keep Van Nuys rural”.

Thomas Chambers is one of America?s foremost folk artists. I found a piece by him that I just don?t like very much. It is a bit austere for my tastes. The subject is a fishing scene with villagers and boats. I don?t think that I will purchase this folk art painting because I just don?t like it.

There was a folk art painting I found called Alligator Fisher that was painted in 1940 that I really like. The blue of the bayou is very calming and the trees give it a very Southern feel. There is a swamp house in the painting and I like this one very much. It reminds me very strongly of Louisiana.

My mother started this passion of mine for folk art paintings. She had a folk art painting by John Roeder in our parlor growing up. I used to spend hours just staring into it. The trees were so relaxing to lose myself in. I have asked her to give me this wonderful folk art painting many times, but she says that I will have to wait until after her funeral!

I found one folk art painting during my journey that I felt sad every time I looked at. The name of the painting is A Letter from My Mother. The look in the girl?s face is so serious and sad. I have no idea where this folk art painting should hang. The painting itself is magnificent; it just makes me feel sad.

There is a whole subset of folk art paintings that represent black Americana. I don?t usually buy any of these pieces as they don?t speak to my experience. I did find one piece that I purchased for a collector friend of mine that loves this type of art. The folk art painting had a whimsical feel to it and a woman relaxing in a hammock. He hung this in his hallway and has loved it for a long time.

My brother likes folk art paintings as much as I do. He prefers animals to be the subjects of paintings he purchases. I found a lovely clouded leopard folk art painting for him last Christmas and he has asked that I keep my eyes open for more like it. He said that he will buy any art I find for him because he trusts that I know and understand his tastes.

I have kept my eyes open for animal themed folk art paintings for my brother, but I just can?t seem to find any as nice as the leopard that I got for him. The grand extent of animal themed folk art paintings I?ve found recently was a painting of two owls on a limb and I know that he would not like it. Ever since we were kids, owls totally freak him out.

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Buying Paintings: Cubism

What started out as a rather avant-garde art movement has become one of the greatest examples of artistic forms breaking that mold of convention, revolutionizing European painting and sculpture up to the present century, and was first developed between 1908 and 1912 during a collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso with influences from the works of Paul Cezanne and Tribal art. Though the movement itself was not long-lived, it began an immense creative explosion that has had long lasting repercussions, and focused on the underlying concept that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously.

The movement had run its? course by the end of World War I, and influenced similar ideal qualities in the Precisionism, Futurism, and Expressionistic movements. In the paintings representative of Cubist artworks, objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form, and the artist depicts the subject in a multitude of viewpoints instead of one particular perspective. Surfaces seemingly intersecting at random angles to produce no real sense of depth, with background and object interpenetrating with one another, and creating the shallow space characteristic of Cubism.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term cubism, and it was after viewing a piece of artwork produced by Braque, the term was in wide use though the creators kept from using the term for quite some time. The Cubist movement expanded from France during this time, and became such a popular movement so quickly that critics began referring to a Cubist school of artists influenced by Braque and Picasso, many of those artists to Cubism into different directions while the originators went through several distinct phases before 1920.

As Braque and Picasso worked to further to advance their concepts along, they went through a few distinct phases in Cubism, and which culminated in both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism. With Analytic Cubism, a style was created that incorporated densely patterned near-monochrome surfaces of incomplete directional lines and modeled forms that play against each other, the first phases of which came before the full artistic swing of Cubism. Some art historians have also pegged a smaller ?Hermetic? phase within this Analytical state, and in which the work produced is characterized by being monochromatic and hard to decipher.

In the case with Synthetic Cubism, which began in 1912 as the second primary phase to Cubism, these works are composed of distinct superimposed parts. These parts, painted or pasted on the canvas, were characterized by brighter colors. Unlike the points of Analytical Cubism, which fragmented objects into composing parts, Synthetic Cubism attempted to bring many different objects to create new forms. This phase of Cubism also contributed to creating the collage and papier colle, Picasso used collage complete a piece of work, and later influenced Braque to first incorporate papier colle into his work.

Similar to collage in practice, but very much a different style, papier colle consists of pasting materials to a canvas with the pasted shapes representing objects themselves. Braque had previously used lettering, but the works of the two artists began to take this idea to new extremes at this point. Letters that had previously hinted at objects became objects as well, newspaper scraps began the exercise, but from wood prints to advertisements were all elements incorporated later as well. Using mixed media and other combinations of techniques to create new works, and Picasso began utilizing pointillism and dot patterns to suggest planes and space.

By the end of the movement, with help from Picasso and Braque, Cubism had influenced more than just visual art. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was inspired by Cubism in some examples of his music that reassembled pieces of rhythm from ragtime music with the melodies from his own country?s influence. In literature, Cubism influenced poets and their poetry with elements parallel with Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, and this poetry frequently overlaps other movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism.

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?Buying Paintings: Romanticism

Though sometimes referred to as the “anti-classical” movement in art, Romanticism is a style that focuses on the artist’s individualistic and emotionally wrought point of view, and is found to oppose the art movement known as Neoclassicism. Even though there have been many artists to combine elements of both. Some of the more renowned names around this movement, which utilized strong emotion to convey meaning, were Francisco de Goya and William Blake respectively. This particular art form became a reaction to the outgrowth of reason by homing in on imagination and feeling.

It is not difficult to see the value in the paintings by these artists, and there have been many examples of how other artists have influenced one another over time. As the whole category of Romanticism refers more to the trends of artists, poets, and philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries than as much to an artistic movement. Though one has definitely influenced the other and vice versa rather equally as time went along, there are very few areas in modern life that can be said to stay untouched by the Romantic period, and many agree that this was a vital point in the world’s development as a whole.

Where the people of the period at the time were involved in an overwhelming interest in things of a rational or enlightened nature, the Romantic ideal favored intuition instead, and has been the subject of many differing characterizations of the movement for intellectual and literary histories. There are many varying attitudes on how Romanticism has affected the modern world, and what place this movement has had in the greater picture of history. Some cite Romanticism as being the originating moment of modernity, while others seem to think that it is a beginning to a resistance to the enlightened age, and still others date the movement as a direct aftermath of the French Revolution that is completely continuous with the present.

Romanticism was previously mentioned as affecting music and literature as well as art, but this is less understated than it might seem at first, Romanticism is very prominent in the music and literature of this period. As the age moved along, more than a few critics have considered composers such as Mozart, Hadyn, and Beethoven as being the three Romantic composers. In literature all over the world, the Romanticism movement deeply affected every writer from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe through to even the 20th century’s Ayn Rand, and many more writers between those times when Romanticism was most prominent.

As it became apparent that Romanticism was going to stay a strong influence for many years to come, many critics have taken to confirming that the Romantic period has been elemental in the progress of art to the present day, and that there is almost no famed artist who has not been in part affected by these potent periods of artwork and creative purpose. This rebellion against social and political standards of the age was instrumental in the changing over from those same standards, and created a lush place from which to draw inspiration for the next centuries to come.

Romanticism has become a piece of history that cannot be overlooked for very long as every place that one can turn has somehow been affected by the progress from this one particular time period, though that is certain for many artistic movements that have been present throughout time, and seems to put more clout into the common statement of art imitating life and life imitating art. Neo-Romanticism worked itself out through artists’ reevaluation of the earlier works by those like William Blake, and especially in areas like Britain, creating a new underground of writers, artists, and composers.

Neo-Romanticists have been considered the contrast to naturalism as Romanticism was considered the opposite to Neoclassicism in its’ heyday because of the movement seems to stress feeling and internal observation, as opposed to the naturalistic tendency to stress external observation, and utilize historic rural landscapes to react to the modern world of machines and its’ urbanization. Post-romanticism is an outgrowth of passionate art that refers to a postmodern re-enactment of romantic themes and motifs in contemporary art up to today, and combines the best of traditional artwork with a more modern flair.

In regards to the 20th century turns that Romanticism has made, Romantic realism has evolved out of Romanticism to incorporate elements of themes of value while referring to objective reality and the importance of technique, and was popularized though not coined by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. This lead to artists incorporating Romanticism and Realism, though they seemed more weighed to the Romanticist side of the equation, and is considered more as a branching of the Romanticism movement today.

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Buying Paintings: Symbolism

Evoking a taste similar to the Romanticist tradition, but utilized mysticism and sensitivity through mythology and dream imagery, preceding the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung. With a strong philosophical touch, more so than a style of art, and Art Nouveau and Expressionist artists such as Edvard Munch. Beginning in France as a reaction to the movements of Naturalism and Realism, which seemed to capture the particular components of consensual reality, and presented spirituality and imagination reflecting some artists budding interest in religion and spirituality.

In literature, poet Charles Baudelaire was developing his work and the movement, and especially with such luminaries as Verlaine contributing to the collective effort of the literary movement during the 1860s and through to the 1870s. With the works of Edgar Allen Poe coming to popularity in the 1880s, the Symbolism movement in artwork represented an outgrowth into the darker and more gothic nature of Romanticism, and contrasted with Romanticism?s rebellious and impetuous sides. Symbolist writers wrote in very metaphoric and suggestive manner, to imbue the subjects with a sense of symbolic meaning, and made realistic images into representatives for more esoteric and primordial ideas.

In translating the language of dreams into artwork with symbolic leanings, discovering a visual style that draws upon that philosophical approach that captures a sense of art that has been influential on more than one movement artistically, and has evoked some of the more fantastic imagery to ever cross a canvas. The Symbolist Manifesto was published in 1886, leading to a description of the movement that included ideas such as being hostile towards plain and matter-of-fact meanings, and to express the ideal in a perceptible form was the sole purpose of this art form.

Symbolists that preferred poetic means of conveying their ideas, were known for their techniques of removing technical aspects to achieve a greater fluidity for their work, and became related with seeking use of symbolic images over raw description to evoke the state of the poet?s soul. Paul Verlaine was influential in an 1884 publication defining the essence of Symbolism, through many essays on the relevant poets of the day, and came to the conclusion of relating the works of this movement to the famed philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose own work delved into art as a means of refuge from the strife of the world.

These similarities, which presented a contemplative and artistic refuge using themes such as mortality and otherworldliness, created disparaging arguments between critic and artist alike. Leading to many Symbolist poets of the day to make their own publications and periodicals, and the literary Symbolism then reached its? peak in the year 1886, with one particular periodical lasting until 1965. Though the two aspects of the movement were distinct, they would occasionally overlap each other, and became a continuation for mystical tendencies in a Romantic tradition, even flirting with the self-consciously dark Decadence movement.

There were several dissimilar groups of painters and visual artists within the Symbolism movement, and the artistic movement seemed to have a greater impact worldwide than the literary movement, reaching multiple artists and sculptors from such distinct parts as Russia. Many of the symbols found herein are not necessarily universal, but more personally affected with the artist?s obscure and private references, with some dreamlike subject matter influencing later Surrealists. Symbolism has had a strong link to music for a while, and mostly due to the enthusiasm for the work of Richard Wagner, whose own music reflected his influence from the philosopher Schopenhauer.

Symbolism even grew to affect some of the literary fiction contributed by Oscar Wilde and Paul Adam, and has a pronounced ring when speaking about movements that have literarily and artistically that have crossed over into other inner groupings of artistic work. The waters of Symbolism have even filtered down the centuries into the state of motion pictures today, and early on held influence with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, as well as Russian actor and director Vsevolov Meyerhold?s method of acting that influenced early motion pictures.

It is difficult to overlook Symbolism?s influence and repercussions throughout the timeline to the current period of the world, as it drifts through many aspects taken for granted on a daily basis, and many pieces of work for many artists from writer T. S. Eliot to painter Pablo Picasso and even the state of horror films as well. A decidedly different state of the world now has interpreted and reinterpreted all this throughout these hundreds of years, and created more and more material reflections of the state of things as they happen to be.

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